Israel snubs settlement criticism

Thursday, December 6, 2007 : The U.S. has requested that Israel provide clarifications on its plan to build more than 300 new homes in an East Jerusalem neighborhood, Israeli officials confirmed to Haaretz on Thursday. The new housing would expand Har Homa, a Jewish neighborhood in an area Palestinians claim as the capital of a future state.

The Palestinians call the area Jabal Abu Ghneim, and Palestinian officials have appealed to the U.S. to block the project.

The officials said U.S. diplomats who met with senior government officials in Jerusalem this week said that Washington hoped to gain insight on what the construction project would mean for the peace process.
Advertisement According to the officials, the Americans said they wanted to know "what this thing is exactly and where it's coming from." The officials told Haaretz that they had explained to the Americans that the construction of the 307 housing units was approved long before the Annapolis peace summit that took place last month.

"We told them this was nothing new, and that anyway this was a construction project inside Jerusalem, which is Israel's capital, and that we regard this as perfectly legitimate."

According to the road map, Israel is supposed to cease all settlement construction. But Israel does not consider construction in East Jerusalem to be settlement activity.

UN, Arabs condemn plan
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon slammed on Thursday Israel's plan to build more than 300 new homes in an East Jerusalem neighborhood.

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Thursday, December 6, 2007 : The renewed political negotiations require the peace camp to make a historic decision, which it should have made a long time ago: Is its main purpose the promotion of peace or the subjugation of the settlers? Ostensibly this is a rhetorical question, but the experiences of recent years show that occasionally the peace camp has initiated activities designed only to harm the settlers, even if these actions did not contribute to peace, and sometimes even undermined support for it.

One example is the tremendous effort to remove outposts of negligible political importance. Another is the belligerent anti-settler rhetoric, which probably has distanced many people who are not "right-wing by nature" from the peace camp.

There are two dimensions to the decision on whether to promote peace. One is practical: The settlers must be a very relevant factor in the negotiations. Their needs must be regarded as an inseparable part of the talks, and the government must conduct a dignified dialogue with them, alongside the dialogue with the Palestinians. Just as it is impossible to disregard Palestinians who oppose negotiations (Hamas and its ilk) - and even those who oppose dialogue with Hamas understand they must at least consider Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' need to take the extremist movement into account - likewise, Israelis who oppose negotiations cannot be removed from the picture. Certainly when it is these Israelis who will be the main victims of the negotiations' outcome.

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